December 11, 2009

How Al Jazeera Outlasted Rumsfeld

The day after his first round of testimony to Congress, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was on a press tour. First stop was National Public Radio, with its internationally inflected American elite audience. Second stop was the obligatory sitdown with the dean of the world press corps, Christianne Amanpour at CNN. Interview number three took place in an ordinary-looking Nixon-era office building in downtown, D.C.At about 3:00 pm, McChrystal and a small retinue of aides arrived at the American broadcast center of Al Jazeera English, the three-year old cousin of the Qatar-based Arabic language news channel. (Robert Kaplan wrote about AJE here.)This was an important day for "English," as its employees call it, perhaps the most self-validating...

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